I have built my own terminal. What do you think about it?

by biberklatsche • 3 years ago

2 6 3 years ago

4 years ago I started to build my own terminal out of interest. I am a programmer and was not happy with what was available at the time. I wanted a terminal that would run on different operating systems and look nice. I also found myself looking for the same command over and over again because I just couldn't remember it. I mean, I've typed it a thousand times. Why the hell can't my terminal tell me the exact syntax right away? So I built a self-learning auto-completer into my terminal. And that made it surprisingly efficient to use. It was not planned to publish it. It was just supposed to be my little fun project, but at some point a colleague noticed it and wanted it too. Now almost everyone in my company uses Cogno and it has become something bigger. And if most of my colleagues like it, maybe some of you will too. I would like to know your opinion. What do you think about Cogno? Any help is welcome.

billconan• 3 years ago

very cool! I wanted to create a terminal myself too. I was trying to implement a native solution, but the estimated workload is too much for me.

I'm also considering xterm.js, but do you see any performance issue using it?

Also, can it be easily customized?

biberklatsche4• 3 years ago

Hi billconan, I quickly made a video. You can see the styling possibilities there. https://youtu.be/fuHaLM2j-RM The video was made on a M1 MacBook Air. The shell is ZSH.

I don't feel that performance is an issue, it depends on what you mean by performance. Memory consumption is higher than with native terminals. From a speed perspective, I do not see any difference. You have to deal with the same problems as VSCode for example.

My colleagues have been using the terminal productively on Windows for more than a year. It runs stable, the performance is ok. As the autocompleter learns from your input, it becomes more and more personal and tuned to what you are doing. I don't want to miss it anymore.

Cogno is open source. You might want to take a look at it. The master branch is a mess at the moment. I have been rewriting Cogno for the last 4 months. When the current branch is on master, things should be easier.

TheRealGL• 3 years ago

Downloaded 'cogno' (0.15.0) and 'cogno-nightly' (0.16.0-nightly) deb packages, installed and proceeded through the wizard. In both versions I couldn't select a theme, and I couldn't select a font as there wasn't an option to do that. Once I hit the 'finish' screen, I clicked 'finish' repeatedly and nothing happened. I couldn't use the terminal. Bad times. Sorry.

biberklatsche4• 3 years ago

Oh thank you for your feedback. Which OS are you using? Cogno has been mostly used on Windows and MacOS (Apple Silicon) so far. Linux systems are little tested.

biberklatsche4• 3 years ago

Hi TheRealGL, Maybe I could fix this issue. I just deployed a new insiders build for Linux Ubuntu/Debian. I'm using Ubuntu 22.04 and couldn't find any more problems. It would be super nice if you could test it again. I would really appreciate it. Thanks for your help!

I have built my own terminal. What do you think about it?

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